Hello all,
Thank you for your replies. I went to checkout a Series 1 J head today. The owner has owned it for 20 years, used it seldomly, and knew very little about it. I'm a novice, and I was teaching him how to use it toward the end of my visit. He used it mainly, from what I could gather, as a drill press. He is selling it because he's moving out of state and does not want to move it.
From the serial number I found the mill to be made in 1969. It is a 3 phase, step pulley J head, It's seen a lot of use and wear in it's life. I stayed for 3 hours to test all of the things I could think to test. My initial reaction is to pass on the machine, but I wanted a second (and third) opinion to make sure I'm making the right decision here. This is literally the first mill I've ever gone to buy.
The owner wanted $4000 for the mill, vise, and some tooling. At the end of my visit I told him it's worth more like $1.5K w/o tooling and maybe $2k w/ tooling. I think it's really worth more like $1K all things considered, but again, I'm a novice and I'll defer to your guys' expertise. He agreed on the $2K price, but I'm confident I could get him lower, because he now sees the issues the machine has.
What I found:
1. The machine was covered in oil/grease/dirt/chips, even though he was trying to sell it.
2. The table had a big chunk milled out of the middle, which was covered initially by the vise. Is this fixable?
3. Powerfeed motor was missing.
4. DRO X axis was not accurate, Y axis was fine. (likely fixable, but I'd probably replace the DRO as it was very old)
5. 45 thousandths of backlash in X and Y axes. (likely adjustable)
6. Turret, ram and head moved in all directions (yay!)
7. The X axis had 3 thousandths deflection toward each end and 1 thousandth in the middle.
8. The Y axis had .5 thousandths deflection toward the end nearest the column and 8.5 thousandths toward the opposite end.
9. The Z axis had 5 thousandths deflection.
10. The quill had 2 thousandths deflection from side to side, and also scoring on the right side from the quill lock.
11. The spindle itself had .5 thousandths runout when running not under load.
12. The ways on the Z axis looked good, still plenty of flaking/frosting (not sure the correct term for that)
13. The ways on the X axis were not visible because the mill was in a small room and the X axis couldn't be fully transversed.
14. The ways on the Y axis looked highly worn, Flaking visible on the extreme ends but the middle was smooth as glass.
The Y axis was by far the worst of the 3 axes, so I took off the guard and the wipers to adjust the gibb. The gibb was bottomed out already (a previous owner must have done this, since the current owner didn't even know what the gibbs were, what they did, or where to find them)...
So like I said, my initial reaction is to pass on it, it seems like a worn out machine that's been misused. But if the wear to the ways can be fixed in a reasonable fashion, then it'd be a decent machine.
My questions:
1. can the slop in the Y axis (8 thousandths difference from one end to the other) be fixed either by scraping, shimming, etc, in my own shop, or is that too far worn?
2. can a milled/damaged bed be fixed by filling with weld and remilling it flat using the mill itself?
3. Should I just make a hard pass on this mill and keep looking like my gut is telling me to do?
I've attached images, hopefully they work.
Thank you for your replies.